Possibly, however, there is one sound reason for wishing that Mr. Meredith would be just a little less insistent on differences, and would now and then “mitigate the rancor of his tongue;” that reason is based on the fear that in this stupid world of ours compromise and conventionality are needed to secure any adequate hearing. It seems a great pity that so many people should be frightened away from Mr. Meredith’s work by its mannerism, and should be oblivious to some of the most suggestive current criticism of modern life. To Americans it seems specially to be regretted that English people should be so little receptive of the ideas of the most comprehensive and the least insular of their novelists. Mr. Meredith has grasped English life in its whole range and in all its vast complexity. He has dealt with the high and the low, with rustic and cockney, with plebeian and aristocrat, with the world of letters and the world of art and the world of fashion, with the modern “conquerors” of social power and position, and with the hereditarily great. All this vast range of life he has portrayed with equal vividness and with the same unfailing sympathy and insight; and yet his point of view is always curiously beyond the radius of the British Isles, and many of his implications are by no means favorable to the present organization of English social and political life. Of course, it may be this very lack of insularity that prevents a better understanding between him and his public. Detachment on his part may make attachment on their part impossible. And yet this ought not to be so; for despite his occasional severities and the all-pervading independence and individuality of his tone, no one has loved English life more heartily, studied it more painstakingly, or represented it more patriotically. Indeed, certain of its important aspects can be found adequately portrayed only in Mr. Meredith’s pages; for example, the genuine irresponsibleness of the most brilliant English life. No other novels offer us such pictures of the world of the luxuriously idle and systematically frivolous, of the habits and homes of the people who have never been wont to give an account of themselves to others, who have made idling into a fine art, and feel that the land exists for them to shoot over, and the sea for them to sail on in yachts. The so-called society-novelist succeeds admirably with the gowns and the etiquette of this region, but gives us for its inhabitants a lamentable lot of insipidities. But Mr. Meredith’s aristocrats have brains as well as deportment and decorations; they have the mental and moral idiom, the wit and the culture and the weight of men of birth and position, their prejudices, too, and perversities. That some wildness and even rankness of style should keep the British public from enjoying Mr. Meredith’s vigorous and sympathetic studies of its idolized “upper classes” seems strange; and even more regrettable